Living Outside The Box

The reason to do all this is about working to pioneer new methods to save the world - one ocean plankton bloom, one forest, not one discovery at a time. All at once.
This blog and my lifes work is dedicated to my 3 children and 2 grandchildren and yours too...and to mysteries of nature some discovered most not.

We can restore the Atlantic Cod back to historic abundance in just a few years.

An open letter to The Pew Charitable Trusts

We just need to restore the atlantic cod by reviving their ocean plankton pastures.

The top fish-head at the Pew Charitable Trust has published an op-ed about the disappearing Atlantic Cod titled, “Prey For Return of Atlantic Cod Population” in a New England Eco publication. Here’s my open letter in response… pew pew pew…

The continued preying on the ‘usual suspects’ by the author, Peter Baker of Pew Charitable Trusts, of this article and hundreds like him misses the mark by a country mile. In-spite of his tip of the hat to ecosystem changes, his op-ed reveals as much intransigence in his and his institutions nature as that of the over-fishermen he heaps blame upon.

Conservation fails

In 1992 the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, John Crosbie, declared a moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery, which for the preceding 500 years had largely shaped the lives and communities of Canada’s eastern coast. Fishing societies interplay with the resources which they depend on: fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes the fishery and society to adapt. In the summer of 1992, when the Northern Cod biomass fell to 1% of its historic abundance. Canada’s government declared a moratorium ending the region’s 500-year relentless attack on the Atlantic Cod.

In spite of the now 25 year long conservation moratorium on commercial cod fishing in the North Atlantic the fish have still not returned. The simple fact has been and is that the Atlantic Cod were starved into near extinction due to the collapse of productivity of their ocean pastures. The remnant of Cod barely able to survive the drought of dust that caused their pasture collapse were overfished as any catch at all of the starving schools was too much. Those ocean pastures condition has continued to worsen.

The fact that Cod and fish everywhere are disappearing in lock step with the very clearly shown collapse of ocean pastures makes things easier to understand.

All Beef Is Grass

If we can help people understand the easily understood and common concept of pastures as they relate to ocean fish, the means to bringing the fish back becomes obvious. Pastures, whether on land or at sea, can only sustain ‘livestock’ if the pastures are growing grass (phyto-plankton).

Walt Whitman taught this a century ago when he said, “All beef is grass.” Indeed I say, “All fish is plankton.”

In every environment on land humanity has worked tirelessly for thousands of years to learn how and to take care of pastures, to keep the grass in abundance, so that livestock could thrive on those pastures. The ocean is not one vast blue environment, it is a seascape made up of countless ocean pastures.

Millions Of Tonnes Of African Dust Crosses The Atlantic 24 June 2014

Those ocean pastures are dying because they rely on dust in the wind to keep the grass, the plankton growing. That dust is just as vital to ocean pastures as rain is to pastures on land. Without it the ocean pastures become more desert-like. Here’s a link to how this works.

A large part of the crisis for ocean fish is the insistence by so many who live and proselytize by the “donate here button” is that they must have conveniently simple bad guys as targets for their ‘ire for money outrage’. When the real cause of a problem is not “the usual suspects” it is so very much more difficult to be successful trolling “click bait” in the public pond.

While bad over-fishing does surely take place especially on the last of the fish pastures the real most urgent solution is to restore many fish pastures so that the fishing pressure is spread thin. Not to engage in a fight with the bad guys. But as we know in media of all sorts, “If it bleeds, it leads” and fight stories are far more effective sales pitches than simple solution stories.

The means to BRING THE FISH BACK is now proven, immediately deployable, inexpensive, incredibly speedy, and IT JUST WORKS!

Restore Atlantic ocean cod pastures now. You can find plenty to read on this topic here on my blog, start reading. We can help Mother Nature if we don’t delay, take dust back to her ocean to save the day.

The worst possible scenario for the purveyors of never-ending doomsday and (donate here)… the best possible news for the fish and the whole of the ocean environment.

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Interesting Snippets

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact." Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

"It's like religion. Heresy in science is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite." - Thomas Gold

Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible.

" If you steal from one person, well they call that plagarism. I steal from everyone, they call that research. - Woody Guthrie

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. - Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover. - H. Poincare

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. - Max Planck

Corollary: Science advances funeral by funeral.

A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. - Mark Twain

Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - R. George

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. - Howard Aiken

I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here ... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped. - U.S. Senator Simon Cameron, on the Smithsonian Institute (1901)

The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who's doing it! The Roman Rule

"I never make predictions, especially about the future" - Casey Stengle